


Revive

by Molly



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-09
Updated: 2011-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:38:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Molly/pseuds/Molly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for," Sam says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revive

**Author's Note:**

> This was written before 6th season started, when all we had was rumors about how long Sam has been back before he hooks up with Dean. It's been jossed all to hell and back. It treats some heavy things fairly lightly, and is basically an excuse for Sam and Dean to clutch at each other and make wildly schmoopy declarations. It's just _dressed up_ as a story. :) If you're good with that, read on! As an added bonus, this fills [#26](http://mollyamory.livejournal.com/12127.html#cutid1) on my 30_snapshots grid - _demon._

 

There's blood on Sam's face. That's the first thing Dean notices. Not that Sam's _back_ , not that Sam's not _possessed_. That Sam's _bleeding_. It's a cut that wraps around from his temple to just under his cheekbone in a jagged, dripping red line, and it's not supposed to be there. Dean's supposed to take care of Sam, he's supposed to make sure shit like that doesn't happen. He's frowning, reaching toward it, watching Sam's eyes widen in confusion, when Sam grabs his wrist and stops his hand halfway between them.

"Dean?"

"You're _bleeding._ "

Sam's eyes go a little wider. "Kind of a back-burner problem right now, dude. There's a demon in your kitchen."

"Right." Dean shakes his head; it doesn't help, doesn't make things go back to their right places. "Right, yeah." He lets his hand fall, but he can't take his eyes off Sam. "There's a demon."

"Lisa should be more careful who she invites home from yoga class."

"Okay."

Sam rolls his eyes and gives Dean a shove. "I know it's been a while," he says slowly. "But demons are bad. We need to kill it."

It's the tone that does it; this kid's been irritating the fuck out of Dean with that condescending bullshit voice since he got old enough to do his math homework alone. Not even coming back from Hell gets him a pass on that. Dean's eyes narrow and he takes a step forward, and then he can feel the heat of Sam's actual real living body against his because Sam's _alive_ , and real, and himself, nobody but Sam could ever sound that much like Sam.

He chokes on his next breath, loses track of which way it was going. He coughs, doubles over clutching at Sam's jacket -- leather under his hand, cold leather wet with rain, since when does Sam wear leather? -- and coughs until he's heaving, bile coming up in his throat and spilling out all over the floor. Sam holds him while it goes on and on, his stomach cramping and twisting inside him like it's trying to bring up something vile. It doesn't stop till he's emptied out, and even then his insides feel twitchy, like they could go again if he makes even one wrong move. He wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt, which he realizes all at once is a nice pale blue cotton blend and buttoned at the wrist; it makes him feel like hurling all over again.

"Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for," Sam says. He gives Dean's shoulder a squeeze, then a shove. "But we can talk about it later. You remember any Latin, Mr. Smith?"

Dean shakes his head. "Don't even joke."

  


* * *

  


They don't need the Latin.

One Winchester, grieving and domesticated, probably sounds a lot like lunch to your average demon. Two of them, wild-eyed and high on the first rush of reunion doesn't seem like such an easy meal. There's a cute blonde in pink lip gloss and a blue leotard and then there's a cute blonde on the floor with a river of oily black crap spilling out of her mouth. A spark of kinship flares in Dean's chest; he's just gotten rid of his own demons, back there on the living room floor.

"She'll be okay," Sam says, kneeling beside her, his fingers looking rough and worn against the soft, pale skin of her throat. "Well," he amends, "she'll probably need some therapy," and Dean sags against the kitchen counter and starts to laugh.

Lisa looks from one of them to the other, and then to her friend. Dean watches her chin firm up, watches the line between her eyes smooth out, and he's not surprised when she ignores them both and kneels down on the hard tile floor. He can see the girl's eyes starting to flutter, see the pink starting to come back into her cheeks, even before Lisa takes her hand. "Beth?"

Dean jerks his head at Sam, and waits for Sam to pass through the door before he turns back to Lisa. "She really will be okay," he says. "She'll be freaked, and she won't want to be alone. But she'll be fine. If it had been in there long enough to hurt her, she'd be dead already."

Lisa glances up. She tries on a trembling, half-hearted smile. "That's comforting, I guess."

"Good thing Ben's over at Kevin's for dinner."

The look that comes across Lisa's face tells Dean it's not a good time to talk about Ben right now. It hangs unspoken between them, how it could have been Lisa with the second-hand smoke problem tonight; how it could have been Ben.

"I've got her," Lisa says, and turns away from him. It's as clear a dismissal as he's ever seen.

"You want me to--"

"I've _got_ her, Dean."

Dean nods. He's glad to go, because Sam is back, but Sam's not _right here_ and Dean needs to be where Sam is. He starts out the door, then stops and comes back, grabs a few feet of paper towels off the roll by the sink. "Don't ask," he says, and leaves Lisa and Beth on their own.

Sam's sitting on the sofa in the dark, one side of him lit up by the glow coming in from the neighbor's flood lights next door and the other side blacked out in shadow. Dean can't think of anything to say, but he doesn't really feel the need. He drops the paper towels on his own sick by the chair and spares a second to be grateful for hardwood floors.

It only takes a minute and one trip back to the kitchen to clean up; Lisa's got Beth sitting up by then with her back against the cabinets. Beth looks up when he comes in, her eyes tracking his movements from the door to the trash and back again. Lisa keeps her eyes on Beth.

Fair enough.

When he gets back to the living room Sam says, "She okay?"

Dean doesn't know if Sam's asking about Beth or Lisa, but the answer's the same either way. "Eventually," he says. And then, because he has to ask: "Are you?"

Sam laughs, low and uneven. Dean shoves magazines out of the way and sits on the coffee table across from him; he puts his hands on Sam's hands, folded together between his knees, and looks into Sam's face. It takes a few unsteady breaths, but when Sam answers, his voice seems strong. "I think so."

"I kind of hope you're not a shifter or a revenant or the Devil," Dean says. "But honest to God, I'm too glad you're here to care all that much."

"I'm me." Sam shrugs. "For whatever that's worth."

Dean nods. He believes Sam; and he thinks he'd know if Sam were any different. "You didn't just crawl up out of Hell into my living room tonight. You've been back a while." It's in Sam's smooth, clean-shaven face, the wear on clothes Dean's never seen before. The calluses on his fingers. Dean's not sure if it works that way every time, but he came back smooth as a baby's butt, took months to get his hands back into shape for the work.

Sam nods. His hands clench under Dean's, and Dean squeezes them, keeps holding on. Because it's okay; it hurts, he doesn't get it, but it's okay. Sam's here _now_.

"I wanted you to have...what you have here," Sam says. "And I'm not. I'm not that person, the same person that I was before. I thought this would be better."

"Until tonight."

"I heard there might be trouble."

Dean's eyebrows shoot up. "Spies, Sammy?"

"Friends. Not everybody was on board with your cut-all-ties plan."

"Hey, that was _your_ plan, not mine."

"I said go to Lisa if she'll have you, dude. I didn't say stop calling Bobby and pretend Castiel doesn't exist."

Dean ducks his head. "Yeah, well. Cas fucked off to Heaven to play sheriff. And Bobby was -- it was just too hard. I couldn't talk to him without every word being about you, whether we mentioned you or not."

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be." Dean looks up, looks Sam in the eye and smiles, wide and warm and helpless. "You're here. You're --" Dean's voice cracks, and he laughs. "You're fucking _here._ "

Sam wrenches his hands out of Dean's vice grip and gets his arms around Dean's shoulders, clumsy and awkward, yanking him forward until Dean's face is mashed into Sam's shoulder and Sam's is mashed into Dean's hair. At first Dean's arms are pinned against Sam's chest but he works them free, wraps them around Sam's middle and squeezes until Sam has to fight for breath. He eases up as much as he can stand; no sense in killing the kid when he's just got him back. It's not very much. He clenches his hands into fists in the back of Sam's jacket. Maybe if he can hold on tight enough now, he won't ever have to let go again.

Sam seems to have the same idea, because the time to slap each other's shoulders and pull back comes and goes and neither of them does a thing to mark its passing. Sam's saying something into the top of Dean's head, he has no idea what it is but it sounds a little broken, and Sam's chest is shaking, and there's a strong possibility Dean's gonna end up with some snot in his hair. Sam's always been a messy crier, and it kills Dean how after everything Sam's still exactly the same, his grip around Dean's shoulders and the smell of his skin and the ragged, gasping sound of his breath.

"It's okay," Dean says into the side of Sam's throat. "You're here now. It's okay."

"I'm sorry." The words come out like bullets this second time, like Sam's had his hammer cocked way too long.

"No way." Dean pulls back -- has to fight Sam on it a little -- far enough to look Sam in the eye. "You got nothing to be sorry for, Sammy. You did good. You beat the Devil, dude, what more do you think you owed anybody? You're fucking awesome. Don't you dare think anything different."

"Dean--"

"No." He gives Sam a good, hard shake. Ten years ago -- hell, _five_ \-- it would have made Sam's teeth clatter. Now it's like shoving at a mountain, but it shuts Sam up and that's the important thing. "I know, Sam; I do. I know what it feels like to come back from what's down there. I know it feels like you still got the filth of it threaded through whatever's left of your soul. I know it feels like you came back broken, dangerous; man, I _know_.

"But I also know it's a lie. You gotta hear me on this, okay? That's _them_ talking, wanting you to feel like they can change you, what you are inside. Make you one of them. Break you. But they didn't, they can't."

Sam starts to fight him; tries to pull away, out of Dean's hands, but Dean's not having any of it. He knows the impulse, couldn't stand to have anybody touch him because they'd never be able to wash the taint off again. He came back from the Pit feeling like poison, like a cancer sicked up from the black, twisted guts of the world.

Dean holds on. Because Sam held onto him; through everything, through every stupid thing they said and did to each other, through every lie they told and every truth they didn't, Sam held on. Until it was enough; until Dean could see his own face in the mirror again without flinching.

"They didn't," he tells Sam. Quiet and soft, so Sam has to lean back in to hear him. "Because you're here, and you're my brother, and there is not a fucking thing in the world they could do to you I wouldn't see." He shifts his hands up to Sam's neck, gives him another, small shake. "I know you. I know you like nobody knows you in this world, Sam, and I'm telling you: they never touched you, never laid a finger on who you are. You're my brother, and I love you, and I would know. I would know, all right?"

Sam nods, never taking his eyes off Dean's, nods through the tears and snot covering his face because whatever else they've been through he's still got that trust in his big brother at the very rock bottom of him. So Dean does what big brothers do; he rolls his eyes, and he bunches up the cuff of his spiffy blue button down and wipes Sam's face with it -- as much as Sam will let him, anyway.

Eventually Sam remembers how old he is and starts fending Dean off, rearing his head back and shoving at Dean's arms. He laughs, a weird, high gurgly sound, and says, "Dude, cut it out. That shirt is toast."

Dean looks down at his sleeve, which in actual fact is completely wrecked, wet and gross and mistreated. "No loss," he says. "I never liked it all that much anyway."

  


* * *

  


Things sort themselves out a little better before Ben gets home, without anybody much trying. Sam washes his face, Dean digs an old AC/DC T-shirt out of a drawer upstairs, Lisa makes everybody tea. They sit around for a while in the dining room, cups clinking on saucers, trying to find some common ground between "How was yoga class?" and "So...demons?"

It's into one of the resulting silences that Ben clatters in with his backpack and his skateboard and the cletes he's supposed to take off before he comes into the house. He stops wide-eyed at the scene in front of him, his mouth in a wide 'O' of surprise, and then he says to Sam, "Hey...aren't you supposed to be dead?"

That goes over great with Beth, who stares at Sam and starts shaking all over again; and who can blame her? Dean's scared shitless of all this crap himself, and he's known about most of it since he was five. Lisa gets stuck between reassuring Beth and scolding Ben for being rude (Dean isn't sure how legit shock at seeing a dead guy at the kitchen table counts as rude, but the lady has standards) and somewhere in the middle of that, of Beth crying and Lisa glaring and Sam trying to squash himself into half his own mass with nothing but embarrassment and will, Dean understands that this is his last time at this table; he's leaving.

He's _leaving_. Relief hits him like a punch in the gut, nearly knocks the wind out of him. The world expands, snaps back into its proper shape and size; he looks up, almost expecting to see the roof peel back overhead. He misses his car with a sudden electric yearning that can't be denied and he fishes in his pocket for her keys. They aren't there.

Lisa, because she's the only one who ever came close to being _the_ one, says very softly, "On the hook, just inside the door to the garage."

And then Ben -- because he's _Ben_ \-- says, "Aww, crap!" in sudden understanding, "and you were totally going to let me drive her!"

Dean pulls Ben close, puts a hand on each shoulder and looks into the kid's eyes. "Listen," he says. "I do have to go, and I know that sucks. But I need you to remember one thing about me, even if you forget everything else, okay?" Ben nods, and Dean's grip changes; he gives Ben a shake, then ruffles his hair and says solemnly, "I like you a lot, kid. But I was never, _ever_ gonna let you drive her."

  


* * *

  


Sam pulls the tarp off the car, giving Dean an unreadable look that's going to take some getting into later. He takes his stuff out of the piece of crap he got here in and puts it all in the trunk of the Impala. There's not much of it, and about half of it is artillery, which says a lot about the way Sam's been living, now that he's living again. Dean spends half a second tinkering under the hood -- which is about half a second more than she needs -- then starts her up, just to hear her purr. It's a beautiful sound, and he looks over her roof at Sam. Sam's looking back, and it's like a bone snapping back into its socket -- vicious, unexpected pain that feels so right you want to lie down and die in it.

"You sure about this?" Sam says, looking up at the door to the house.

"Are you? I seem to recall a little song and dance about me being a little too _controlling_."

Sam's face breaks into a wide, delighted grin. "Well, you are."

"Too loud."

"I can live with it."

"Too short."

"It hurts to bend down so far to look at you. But I think I'll survive."

"Well, all right then." Dean taps the roof of the car with his fist. "Long as you keep your gargantuan smelly feet on your side of the car, I think we'll do fine."

He backs the car out of the garage slow, careful of her like he hasn't been in a while; it's like getting a missing arm back, and he doesn't want to risk the tiniest scratch. When they're clear, he leaves Sam in the passenger seat with orders not to touch the radio and heads back into the house to pick up the last of his things, and to say goodbye.

Lisa's got Beth tucked away in the guest room, so that's one awkward audience member out of the way. But Ben's still there, staring at Dean like he's storing up the picture for later, and Dean doesn't have the heart to send him away. Not even for this.

He reaches out for her; she stops him. Her hands come up and lay flat on his chest, under the edges of the jacket he dug out of the trunk just a few minutes ago. She smiles; her eyes are bright, too bright, but the smile feels real and it stays in place when she looks up at him, reaches up and strokes the side of his face.

"You aren't really leaving," she says, "because you never really got here, did you."

"I was here." Dean looks away, looks at Ben. "I wasn't any good at it. But I was here."

Ben lurches forward, latches onto Dean's waist and squeezes for all he's worth. "You were okay," he says, muffled, into Dean's ribs.

"I'll be around." Dean's not stupid; it's a horrible thing to do, taking off like this. Showing up like he did, that was a horrible thing, too. But there's the truth, and there's the lie, and now that Sam's back he knows the difference. He thinks Lisa always knew the difference. "I'll start checking my email, I promise. And I'll text you. A lot."

"Not too much," Lisa says. "They charge by the letter."

She doesn't ask him to email her, or to text her, or to call. Dean doesn't offer. He hugs Ben back, more for his own comfort than for Ben's, and he doesn't hang on too tight when the kid squirms to get away. He wishes he could kiss Lisa goodbye, because he feels like that's how these things are done. But he mostly got that from books and movies, and she doesn't look like a lady who wants to be kissed. She looks like a lady who wants to be left alone.

"If you need anything," he says, to both of them. "Anything at all. Ever."

"We know." She smiles at him, warm and sad and final. "We'll be okay."

"You," he says to Ben, "even if you don't need anything. Just because."

"Oh, my God," Ben says. "Are you leaving _today_?"

Dean laughs. "Okay, yeah. Smart-ass. I'm going."

He loops Ben into another hug, whether he likes it or not; Ben doesn't fight him too hard. Then he hugs Lisa, because she's been warm when he thought he was turning to ice; because he loves her, even if it's not the right way.

And then he goes. Back out to the car, back out to the road.

Back to Sam.

~

 

Feedback is always welcome! :)  



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